Great funding has been approved, proposal has been signed off on, you’re ready to rock and roll on a brand spanking new website. Let’s start developing some pages, right? Hold on a minute and take a step back. You forgot the most important thing you need to understand before doing anything for your new website is to understand the needs of your users.

Most clients do not design a website for the satisfaction of showing off their design savvy or the latest use of HTML5 & CSS3. They are providing users with information, promoting a product or service, speaking to their communities, and/or selling their goods. Too often in designing a website, the focus is on the “widget” (which is also very important). What is often forgotten, however, is how people interact with that “widget.”

Before beginning any website design, it’s best to find out your users’ needs and find out how to improve their website experience or learn what experience they would like to have. At Bailey, this is our Research/Discovery phase and it helps us determine the Information Architecture, content, visual design and development requirements. The goal is to mitigate the potential for the “Oops!” moment during the test phase before launching the site.

Interview customers

In a perfect world, every website would start with interviewing a group of customers, users, or target audience to ask the fundamental questions:  Why did you come; what are you looking for; did you find it; what is the best thing; what do you not like; how can we make your experience better? This helps to ground the company’s ideas about what their site should be.

Review your analytics

If you have an existing site, you should always have analytics installed. Google Analytics (http://analytics.google.com) makes it easy to drill down to find out where people are going. You can see what pages are being visited, and how long your users are on the site. Another inexpensive way to see what the users are clicking is to install a heat mapping software (like http://www.crazyegg.com/).

You should know what the most important content items are needed on your site.

Once you have an idea of what your customers needs are, you’ve analyzed your active pages and organic keywords (we’ll discuss SEO in another blog post) and understand the future focus of the business, you can start to form a list of requirements for content, navigation (primary, persistent or secondary) and design elements.

Look at your competition or other sites in your industry

One last step before designing your site. This can be fun. You need to take a moment to review what your competitors are doing on their sites – what do they call sections, how they are organizing content, what do they think is important. This is your opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competition. Combine what does and doesn’t work on their site with what you’ve learned from your customers. This is key to your user satisfaction.

Lastly, it doesn’t hurt to dream and aspire for the future. Take a look at the big players. It’s possible to rethink some of the interactive elements to make your site stand out.

Start planning your online marketing strategy now.

Build it and they will come . . .never really works.  We will talk more about this later.

In our next blog post, we will talk about Concept Development, or putting all that research into action. Happy website creating! Don’t forget your users!